The Earth in Minecraft, 1:1 scale …for the first time.

For a million years and thousands and thousands of generations, human beings lived out their entire lives without being able to see what you’re looking at right now. Some of them had the opportunity to view it from a hill, or even a mountain top.

But to be born in this time period allows us, for the first time in human history to see the majesty of our birthplace in its totality. When I first played Minecraft, I had a series of pivotal thoughts and colossal ideas that bound me to the game, and one of them involved an idea.

Would it be possible, one day, to create the entire Earth in Minecraft? Could you even view it from a distance like this? Could we one day compare satellite footage of our home planet in real life

With a shot in Minecraft of the Earth from such a high distance that we could view entire continents? I’m here to tell you that thanks to the Cubic Chunks mod and the new Terra 1-to-1 mod, we have taken a huge step in the direction of making it possible with a breakthrough.

I’m currently climbing the entire 8,000-meter height of Mount Everest in Minecraft How is this possible? Well, because of Minecraft’s 256*-meter vertical height limit, making full-scale earth terrain was impossible because the elevation goes above 256* meters on a regular basis. But the Cubic Chunks mod virtually changes the shape of Minecraft chunks

To a 16 by 16 by 16 cube, giving you infinite build depth in both vertical directions. Minecraft is huge. It is so huge, you could fit the entire Earth in a single map file horizontally. But with the Cubic Chunks mod breaking Minecraft’s vertical limitations

We can now experience the Earth in Minecraft, just as it is, with no down scaling of any kind. The Terra 1-to-1 mod takes the information from Google Maps and other geographical data archives and compiles it to create the one-to-one scale of the Earth in Minecraft terrain generation.

Elevation data, tree cover data, roads, even climate data, and soil suborder data to make the Planet Earth map as accurate to the real thing as possible. The terrain generation aspect of Minecraft that is designed after real-world shape does so at much smaller scales. This is so players can view the entire curve of

Geological landmarks like rivers and mountains, no matter what computer you happen to be playing on. But even mods designed to create realistic, world-like terrain fail in comparison to the majesty of real-world geological curvature. Nature, as it turns out, may perhaps always be a greater artist than any of us.

So, how do you install this mod? Simply create a 1.12.2 instance, load the required and recommended mods into the game, create a new world, change the world type to the new option Planet Earth, and you’re good to go. The conversion from longitude and latitude coordinates to Minecraft coordinates is simple.

Simply enter in the coordinate, but only use the number up to five digits after the decimal place. So, for 25.142341, you eliminate the 1 at the end, you get rid of the decimal place entirely, and you have your coordinate: 2514234 Then, guess the elevation, use the same procedure for the z-coordinate,

And you should be ready to teleport to your destination. You can even customize options for the terrain generation including experimental water data, which, while buggy, is the first step to fixing coastline issues Some other issues involving coastlines and oceans include random islands that are not on Google Maps, as well as missing structures

Such as this sand lake structure in Dubai which, when I teleported myself there, was absent. Which leads us to an interesting question: That pattern is obviously human-generated. What should be considered natural terrain as opposed to human-created?

You can see here in Cairo, Egypt, the mod just builds the Great Pyramids as mounds of clay. I think it would be a good idea to have these removed to give players the opportunity to create them themselves, just as they would the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty.

Another idea is ice and snow. Currently, Mount Everest and all other mountains have the one thin layer of snow on top of stone blocks. Incorporating snow and ice blocks could go a long way. The peaks of some mountains that should be icy and snowy don’t even have snow at all.

Right here, I’m walking up a valley in Greenland, where there should be a glacier. Getting massive glaciers and transforming places like Greenland into the gigantic mass of ice that it is would be awesome! But while the Earth is big, a Minecraft world is bigger. So if you were to reach the South Pole,

Which is over eight million blocks south, what then? The Minecraft border limit is 30 million blocks. What generates beyond the South Pole? Here, I’m continually teleporting millions of blocks beyond the negative eight million point that was the South Pole, only to find myself seeing the same terrain over and over again

It turns out for that the next 22 million blocks beyond the South Pole, there is nothing but snowy wastelands for as far as the eye can see, right up to the world border. While this is an interesting beyond-land realm for the edge of the Earth and gives me Game of Thrones vibes,

I think another interesting suggestion would be to fulfill the theories of people from centuries and millennia past who believed the world was flat and that it had an edge. Beyond the South Pole, you could have nothing but void. An endless chasm to signify that you’ve reached the ends of the Earth.

But that was just the southern border. I’ll leave the remaining borders for others to explore. As uniformly breathtaking as this map is, it shows the world today as it would be if humans had never came to be. The Earth is the pinnacle of beauty, but I think that its majesty and wonder

Is completed by one of the rarest forms of matter and energy in the universe: Us. Modern human architecture represents our struggle from the birth of our race, living out miserable lives in the ancient past, but making slight incremental progress to a world that hosts a pinnacle of human comfort and

Prosperity, the likes of which the Earth has never seen. And so, here I am, overlooking the Puget Sound in my hometown of Seattle, announcing my next project and series: I am going to recreate Seattle, in creative mode as it stands today in the real world, right here in Minecraft, on this map.

I thought about doing it in survival mode, but the scope of some projects are just too insane to consider, even for me. But I don’t want to stand alone in this project. That’s why I’m calling for all Minecrafters around the world, skilled builders and organizations to join in on this effort

Start their own Planet Earth map, pick a large city or territory of their own, and work on creating it, one-to-one scale, just as it stands today. When each large city and territory is finished, we can patch them together with map editors,

Until one day, the Earth in Minecraft, with all human-made structures, all of our cities, our towers, cathedrals, railroads, museums, theaters, parks and skyscrapers, all of it, is built and completed in one map that represents our innate human desire to create; to achieve, to persevere in a single visit-able and explorable Minecraft world…

This would be the world to end all worlds. The single, most greatest collective achievement in Minecraft, and I want to see it done in my lifetime. So I’m starting the first break… And while hardware limitations are ours, and certainly my, main obstacle towards achieving the dream of viewing Minecraft terrain,

Thousands of miles in each direction from the top of Mount Rainier, one day, this obstacle will be overcome. And perhaps by then, a 1-to-1 scale model of the Earth with all our human-made structures will be completed, and we can look upon the Earth in a way the universe has never seen before.

The only home we’ve ever known… The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

The only home we’ve ever known…